“Evolution is speeding up, not time.
Consciousness is evolving, becoming aware of itself as creation's mentor.
Children are evolution's front edge. They push at boundaries... challenge the status quo...irritate convention.
That is their job...to set free all that sullies the human heart and blinds the mind to the relationship between the Creator and the Created."
~ P.M.H. Atwater~

The degree of our enlightenment is the degree of passion that we will have for the whole world." ~The Greystone Mandala~

"An Unending Love"

This blog and video is devoted and dedicated to my daughter, my grand daughters, and my grand son. They are hearts of my heart. Our connection through many lives..... is utterly infinite.

By happy fraternity amongst themselves, the embodied beings get the supreme peace. Then all this earth shines like one house. When the men, the embodied beings, treat each other with equal respect and have good brotherly feelings amongst themselves, great peace and harmony abound. Then all this earth shines like one house. The whole world shines like the one dwelling house of the entire human family.

~Ramana Maharshi~

"THRIVE"

"ONLY LOVE PREVAILS ....."

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Friday, March 30, 2012

"Death of the Ego" ~ David Loy

The Fear of
Death is not an instinct: it is a reaction of the animal who is
conscious enough to become aware of himself and his
inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned.
But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the
dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact
we just see, or is this, too, something constructed
and projected, more like an unconscious game that
each of us is playing with himself? According to
Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of
thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead
is how the Ego affirms itself as being alive; so it
is the act by which the Ego constitutes itself. To
be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to
grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their
struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not
dread death, because they are not aware of
themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not
something the Ego has, it is what the
Ego IS. This
fits well with the Buddhist claim that the Ego-self
is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental
construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying
with this fiction for the simple reason that I do
not know and cannot know what this thing that I
supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the
sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.Now we see what the Ego is composed of: death
terror. The irony here is that the death terror
which is the Ego defends only itself. Everything
outside is what the ego IS terrified of, but what is
inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes
everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that
the self-protection this generates is
self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend
the Ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is
indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum
which needs protection. And if it turns out that
what is innermost is so weak because it
is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever
be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to
extend our control to the very bounds of the
universe.

If, however, the Ego is constituted by such a
dualistic way of thinking, it means that an Ego can die
without physical death and without consciousness
coming to an end.

What makes this more than idle
speculation is that there is ample testimony to the
possibility of such Ego death:

No one gets so much of God as the man who is
completely dead. (St. Gregory)

The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly
dead. (Eckhart)

We are in a world of generation and death,
and this world we must cast off. (William Blake)

"'Now death is approaching. I am dying. What is death? This body gets lost.'

"Then he held his breath completely, closed his lips and eyes, lay down as one dead, and began to ponder:

"'Now my body is dead. They
will carry this body, motionless, to the cremation ground and burn it.
But do I really die with this body? Am I merely this body? My body is
now motionless. But still I know my name. I remember my parents, uncles,
brothers, friends and all others. It means that I have a knowledge of
my individuality. If so, the "I" in me is not merely my body; it is a
deathless spirit.'

"Thus, as in a flash, a new
realization came to Venkataramana. His thoughts may seem boyish fancy.
But one thing must be remembered. Usually a man wins God realization by
performing tapas for years and years, without food and sleep; he
subjects the body to great suffering. But Venkataramana won the highest
knowledge without all these. The fear of death left him. Venkataramana
became theBhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi."

NOTE: It should be brought to the attention of the reader
that in 1912, at age 32, fifteen years after Sri Ramana's initial death
experience, he was once again confronted by death, in his little known Second Death Experience.

A moving example of death and resurrection is of
course one of the sources of Western culture; but
examples are found in many religious traditions. The
problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting
the core of psychological and spiritual truth from
the accretions of dogma and superstition that all
too often obscure their meaning, in order for that
truth to spring to life again within our myth--the
technical, objectifying language of modern science
(in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation
(from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the
way because it implies that we are not seeing
clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in
terms of the dualistic categories of birth and
death.Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist
tradition. "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?"
bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no
self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die
because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle
way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self
survives death) and annihilationism (the self is
destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem
of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The
evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking
reveals what is prior to it. There are many names
for this "prior," but it is surely significant that
one of the most common is "the unborn."In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most
famous descriptions of Nirvna both refer to "the
unborn," where "neither this world nor the other,
nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor
birth, nor sense objects are to be found."

"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an
unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were
not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade,
unconditioned, there would not here be an escape
from the born, the become, the made, the
conditioned. But because there is an
unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the
born...."

"FORGIVEN?"

"How does one know if she has forgiven? She tends to feel sorrow over the circumstances instead of rage. She tends to feel sorry for the person, rather than angry with him. She has nothing left to say about it at all."

TECHNOLOGY..........

In “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a warning. I think of it as the Atlantis passage, and I've quoted it a few times before. "As I have said, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink," God tells Walsch. "I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself."

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To Jennifer, My Daughter: "Forever and Always, and Bigger Than the Sun!"

Courage To Change: To Seek Unknown Potential

It takes great courage to change from what is known and comfortable, to what is new and fresh. That which is unknown often contains our greatest potential. To seek our potential by risking change is the path of true greatness...the path of heroism. Such action brings great favor and untold blessings."

The Ultimate Spiritual Practice

The ultimate spiritual practice, as I teach it,is facing everything and avoiding nothing.

When you truly face everything and avoidnothing, you will no longer be afraid to standtall—before your own conscience, beforeothers, before God. This is because you areno longer hiding anything from yourself.

Through this noble practice, you will cultivateintegrity and discover the kind of soul-strengththat only comes from fearlessly facing thetruth. The instinctive defense mechanismsthat the ego hides behind will crumble, and your self and soul will become a transparentvehicle through which the evolutionaryimpulse can work in this world.

THE OBAMETER

My Honor Code

Essentially, I repost articles which I find of interest, be they political, psychological, parenting guidelines, nutrition, etc. Any that I post are the result and leanings, of my views subsequent to years of parenting; and 20 years of clinical/therapeutic work with families, especially children and youth. I provide the source references, as well as some links to the original works. Information provided on this site is meant to complement, and not replace, any advice or information from a medical health professional. As a qualified mental health professional, I try to remain scrupulous about the efficacy of articles I might present, often in the way of comment. In addition, while I have a number of mentors, spiritual and otherwise, I nevertheless respect each person's need to have their own, i.e., you may see my enthusiasm for someone, but they are certainly, and hardly, the only one who has this knowledge. In addition, you will observe that I may paste two contradictory articles. I still respect your intelligence, and capacity for discernment.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." ~ Winston Churchill ~

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